Month: October 2017

Halloween is a time for candy, costumes and the Charlie Brown cartoon special, but how did it become this way? Why are children and teens encouraged to run around the neighborhood threatening tricks? Jack-o’-lanterns are a pretty strange concept, but historically, strangers giving you candy was supposed to be a bad thing. Keep reading to discover 3 weird facts about Halloween that you probably didn’t know.

You may already think that Halloween is a pretty bizarre holiday: What other celebration could inspire both a Sexy Olaf costume and spooky drones? That said, sexy snowmen can’t hold a candle to Halloween’s truly bizarre origins (even if that’s just because a snowman would melt if it held a candle). Chances are you really have no idea just how weird Halloween truly is, so here are eight facts to fix that…

1. Originally, you had to dance for your “treat.”

Most experts trace trick-or-treating to the European practice of “mumming,” or “guysing,”in which costume-wearing participants would go door-to-door performing choreographed dances, songs and plays in exchange for treats. According to Elizabeth Pleck’s “Celebrating The Family,” the tradition cropped up in America, where it would often take place on Thanksgiving.

In some early versions of trick-or-treating, men paraded door-to-door, and boys often followed, begging for coins. Most of these early trick-or-treaters were poor and actually needed the money, but wealthy children also joined in the fun. Door-to-door “begging” was mostly stopped in the 1930s, but re-emerged later in the century to distract kids from pulling Halloween pranks.

2. Halloween is more Irish than St. Patrick’s Day.

Halloween’s origins come from a Celtic festival for the dead called “Samhain.” Celts believed the ghosts of the dead roamed Earth on this holiday, so people would dress in costumes and leave “treats” out on their front doors to appease the roaming spirits. Granted, the Celts were not solely based in Ireland when these customs started taking shape around the first century B.C., but as will be talked about more in a later section, the Irish Celts were the ones who invented the jack-o’-lantern. This Halloween prototype was eventually disrupted and adapted by Christian missionaries into celebrations closer to what we celebrate today, including partly by the not-Irish St. Patrick, whose work was later mostly recognized by Americans.

“St. Patrick’s Day was basically invented in America by Irish-Americans,” said Philip Freeman, a classics professor at Luther College in Iowa. According to National Geographic, the holiday was only a “minor religious holiday” until the 1970s in Ireland. So it’s not all that Irish. And for what it’s worth, St. Patrick probably wasn’t Irish himself, his color was a type of blue, not green, and that story about banishing snakes is actually just a metaphor for his triumph over Irish paganism. The type of paganism that invented Halloween.

3. Some animal shelters won’t allow the adoption of black cats around Halloween for fear they’ll be sacrificed.

It’s unclear whether black cats are actually sacrificed around Halloween, but various animal shelters refuse to let people adopt these cats in the lead-up to the holiday. Lynda Garibaldi, director of The Cats’ Cradle in Morganton, North Carolina, told The Huffington Post that the shelter “does not adopt out black cats during the month of October … because of superstition and the concern that the wrong people (who might harm them) might adopt them.”

This type of ban is starting to wane, however. When reached for comment, Emily Weiss, vice president of Shelter Research and Development at the ASPCA, said, “Years ago, this used to be pretty common — that shelters would not adopt out cats during Halloween for fear of something horrible happening to the cats, but we don’t hear too much anymore. And many, many shelters are actually [holding] a special black cat promotion around the holiday.”

ASPCA provided this list of a few of the black cat adoption promotions that have been tied to the holiday. As Weiss put it, “Most people who go to shelters to adopt a pet are not going to adopt a pet to sacrifice into ritual.”

Halloween is also a time when auto prices drop faster than a heads in a apple bobbing contest. So, if you are looking for the best values of the season, visit Ron Westphal Chevrolet in Aurora, IL. Or, call our customer care team now at 630-898-9630. Our website is always open as well.

The Chevrolet Corvette Grand Sport on display during the Geneva Motor Show in March 2016

If you’re looking for a collectible Corvette, you may want to think about buying a brand new one.

The Bowling Green Daily News reports that Chevrolet — which is a part of General Motors — will stop building the 2018 model on Jan. 22 after a total of just four months of production.

Chevrolet won’t say why.

For all the latest news on Corvette, call our Customer Care Team at 630-898-9630 or visit our website.

The Bowling Green factory where the Corvette has been manufactured since 1981 has been shut down the past few months for the installation of a new paint shop and other upgrades, so the model year was already truncated.

Chevy is still scheduled to build around 9,700 of the coupes and convertibles by January, according to the newspaper, so 2018 cars won’t exactly be rare, but they may end up being among the last of their kind.

GM’s Cruise Automation will expand its test pool, while keeping a focus on city driving, something it has said gives it an edge in the autonomous driving..

GM’s Cruise Automation will expand its test pool, while keeping a focus on city driving, something it has said gives it an edge in the autonomous driving space. What better city to use for testing, then, than New York, one of the densest and most hectic traffic nightmares in North America.

Would you like to test drive a Chevrolet Bolt? Visit our Bolt page for details or call our Customer Care Team now at 630-898-9630 to arrange your VIP appointment.

Cruise will test its self-driving fleet in New York in a five-mile square section of Manhattan, the company announced led via the WSJ, in a move that will also make it the first automaker to test autonomous vehicles in the city. Each will have a safety driver on board, as they do in the current San Francisco test, but now they’ll be tackling inclement four-season weather, as well as other drivers and pedestrians who are less laid back than their west coast counterparts.

Alongside the pilot deployment, Cruise will also be operating a new research center in the city, likely because it doesn’t make much sense to round trip the data back to its offices in San Francisco. No word yet on timeframes for consumer-facing deployment, but as Cruise’s testing in NYC proceeds, it seems likely the GM subsidiary will replicate its staff-facing prototype on-demand autonomous pick up service in Manhattan, too.

Cruise recently explained that it believes its testing in city environments provides much more useful data in terms of helping teach its autonomous driving systems, vs. testing in suburban areas, like the Arizona pilot location for Waymo’s on-demand ride hailing trial. I’d expect more major cities to become testing targets for Cruise as capacity and local regulators allow, then, since it seems like GM will aim to deploy and future consumer self-driving services in those areas first.

The news came tucked away deep in a longer story regarding the Bowling Green factory’s imminent November 6th reopening, after a multi-month reset designed to retool the plant to build new models. The facility will go back to cranking out 2018 Corvettes for two and a half months until concluding that run on January 22nd, according to the paper, at which point the GM plant will begin the process of switching over to the new model.

The million-dollar question, though, is just what that 2019 Chevy Corvette will look like. The eventual arrival of a mid-engined Corvette is pretty much the worst-kept secret in the automotive universe these days, but it’s entirely unclear just when said mid-engined ‘Vette will make its grand entrance—especially seeing as how General Motors also presumably needs to roll out the C7-based Corvette ZR1 before the new eighth-generation sports car arrives. (Also unclear: Just where the new DOHC V-8 confirmed for the 2018 Corvette by internal GM paperwork plays into these future plans.)

Regardless of what sort of car it’ll be, if correct, that January 29th date—coincidentally or not—means the 2019 Chevy Corvette will enter production immediately after the Detroit Auto Show wraps. Could that be a sign that GM has big plans to reveal something very, very fast at the next installment of the North American International Auto Show? Guess we’ll have to wait until 2018 to find out for sure.

The next-generation Corvette is destined to do battle with exotic sports cars like McLarens, but first…McDonalds!

What is almost certainly a camouflaged prototype of the long rumored mid-engine Chevrolet Corvette was spotted pulling into the drive-through of a Michigan Mickey D’s, with two more and a current convertible Corvette parked in the lot nearby.

Despite the heavy cladding and dazzling wrap, the shape of the front of the vehicle exhibits the distinct style of a Corvette, while its long rear deck is a clear indication that its motor is in the middle.

Chevrolet hasn’t even yet acknowledged that it is working on such a vehicle, so details are scarce. Speculation is that it will feature a lightweight chassis, however, and may reintroduce an overhead cam engine to the Corvette lineup, along with a hybrid powertrain.

As for when we’ll know for sure, with the prototypes looking nearly complete, a debut at the Detroit Auto Show in January is looking likely, and sales should follow in 2019.

The real mystery is: what were they doing at McDonald’s? Were they just hungry, or making sure a Big Mac could fit through the Corvette’s window?

The strike at the CAMI Assembly plant in Ingersoll, Ontario, has been going on for weeks now and Chevy is starting to feel the sting in the form of a diminishing stockpile of its popular SUV the Equinox.

From Automotive News:

Stockpiles of the Equinox, GM’s second-best-selling nameplate, are quickly drying up, despite the automaker’s attempts to ramp up Equinox production at two plants in Mexico to supplement Canadian output.

U.S. inventory dropped to 43,453 vehicles, or a 41-day supply, at the beginning of October, according to the Automotive News Data Center. Estimated inventory stood at an all-time high of 74,400 units, or a 66-day supply, in June.

“That’s going to be hard on Equinox to compete on such a limited quantity in such a hot segment,” said Edmunds analyst Jessica Caldwell.

Since the June peak, Equinox inventory has dropped on average about 10,300 units per month. If that pace continues, it would mark the lowest Equinox inventory level since 30,900 vehicles in August 2012.

There are still a lot of Equinoxes left, of course, so buy one while there’s still time. You can find the perfect one for you at Ron Westphal Chevrolet in Aurora, IL. Call our customer care team now at 630-898-9630.

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